Friday, September 29, 2017

I like to find popular unexamined ideas, then satirically
take them seriously and extrapolate them to their comically absurd conclusions.
It’s a great way to get fantasy-story plotlines.

So consider, if you please, the popular nostrum that Faith
Is All You Need. You just have to believe
in yourself; then miracles will happen, and doors will open for you. All that’s
needed is motivation and the willingness to plunge forward despite lacking all
evidence. It’s sincerity, you see,
that counts. It’s not what you know, but how strongly you think it’s so.
Self-confidence is always lucky, because life is fair!

No
doubt you’ve heard this before, from football coaches, New-Age motivational
speakers and Presidential campaign ads, right? And you know it’s BS, right? All
right, then; what if there were a fantasy world in which this stuff is not BS
at all, but verifiably, experimentally true? What if you could industrialize
the effect?

I
submit that such a world would amusingly nightmarish in many interesting ways;
one of which is that their self-serving BS is our home truth; Murphy’s Law,
entropy, and so on.

One
trouble with the all-you-need-is-faith world is that every failure is your own
damn fault. Another problem is that a-holes always
get their own way. Everything becomes a battle of faith and will.

Take
for instance obvious divine intervention in sports events. But won’t the referees
call that cheating? Game called because of miracles!

So
where’s the objective reality? Such a world will tend to disintegrate into
Dickian chaos. It’s a world run by force, not law. Hence a chaotic world, inherently
unjust. Infernal.

I
propose that our hero wish for a world of laws (including, alas, Murphy’s); but
it would have to be “the people” wishing that. Of course this would be a change
that the sociopathic forceful 1% would oppose. Hence a revolution.